Elvis was a mummy's boy

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Bruce Campbell resisted the urge to drag out the tried-and-true Elvis mannerisms.Photo: Supplied

Bruce Campbell may be the only one to play the King as a
geriatric battling the undead.

In certain circles of film fandom, the name Bruce Campbell
carries as much cachet as that of Elvis Presley. So it makes a
strange kind of sense that the legendary star of Sam Raimi's
Evil Dead trilogy should play the king of rock'n'roll in
Bubba Ho-Tep, a genre-defying film that pits an elderly
Presley (complete with dodgy hip and an unsightly bump on his
privates) and an African-American who claims to be John F. Kennedy
("They dyed me this colour!") against a 4000-year-old Egyptian
mummy sucking the souls out of the residents of a dingy Texas rest
home.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Based on a novella by cult author Joe R. Lansdale and directed
by B-movie veteran Don Coscarelli, there is a little more to
Bubba Ho-Tep than its synopsis would suggest, however.
Look beyond Elvis-versus-the-mummy and you'll find a character
study that's unexpectedly poignant and bittersweet, when it's not
bitingly funny or quietly creepy.

From his first read-through of the script, Campbell grasped that
he was dealing with something original. "It's a very strange movie
because it's not really a horror film, it's not really a comedy and
it's not really a drama," he says. "It became clear to me pretty
quickly that it was walking a fine line. And I enjoyed the tone of
it, I enjoyed the irreverent tone Joe Lansdale has in his
writing."

Despite that irreverent tone, Campbell, Coscarelli and Lansdale
decided early on to play Bubba Ho-Tep's story straight.
"There's this serious undercurrent in Joe's story that asks what we
do with our old people. To me, it would have been buried if we were
too silly about it," says Campbell.

Likewise, he resisted the urge to drag out the all-too-familiar
Elvis mannerisms. "You want those reverential old tics to come in
for familiarity's sake but he's really a different character. It's
Elvis minus all of his mojo; the movie should be subtitled How
Elvis Got His Mojo Back. I didn't have to worry about a
full-on portrayal because he's so much older in this story, he's a
shadow of his former self. I was playing this bitter, old guy from
the south - and after 2½ hours of make-up, I can get pretty
bitter."

Campbell opted out of the American "pilot season" - the few
months each year when the new crop of TV shows are cast and when
jobbing actors have their best shots at a serious pay packet - to
play the grumpy old Elvis.

"My agent and manager weren't particularly thrilled about me
taking time out to do a stupid little low-budget movie like this
one. I think it was too weird for them; they just didn't get it.
'Elvis with cancer on his dick? What's this all about?' Plus Don
comes from this exploitation background, he wasn't some hip, young
director. But that made it desirable - that he wasn't some hip
young director. He actually had experience."

As it happens, Bubba Ho-Tep has been a critical success
at its festival screenings and was a small-scale commercial smash
once it hit the home-rental market in the US. It also provided the
actor with some of his best reviews to date. "Campbell gives a
performance for the ages," declared The Hollywood
Reporter.

So Elvis will now return to take on a vampire in a sequel,
Bubba Nosferatu. Before that, Campbell will appear in a
supporting role in Sky High, a Disney movie about a high
school for young superheroes (he plays a buffoonish PE teacher).
And with Sam Raimi developing Spider-Man 3, it's a good
guess that Campbell will crop up once again.

"I gave Spider-Man his name in the first one, and I defeated
Spider-Man in the second one (that snooty usher I played didn't let
him into the theatre). In the third, there'd better be something
just as amazing," he says.

But he doesn't think he will be reprising his signature role as
demon-battling Ash in another of Raimi's Evil Dead movies.
"Sam's riding his gravy train right now. Why would he want to do an
Evil Dead sequel? His only sequel will have a spider in
it."

Not that Campbell is short of things to do. Already a published
author following the release of his autobiography If Chins
Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor, he has also
recently completed his first novel. Make Love the Bruce
Campbell Way is a showbiz romp about the Hollywood way of
life, and Campbell is going on a 40-city book tour across the US
later this year to promote it.

Because that's the Bruce Campbell way. If he's not working hard
making movies, he's working doubly hard to promote his projects.
"Distribution is the hard part," he says. "Any of these yahoos can
go make a movie with a video camera but how do you get it out there
to the masses? The answer is, you work your ass off."

It's a lesson he learned, he says, from his father, an
advertising man for more than 30 years. "You can make stuff but if
you don't sell it, what's the difference?

"You might as well act in a vacuum. I want people to see what I
do; it's how I make a living."